I’m standing in a darkened room while soft, almost New Age music plays overhead. It’s relaxation-tape music, down to the odd moments of the simulated sounds of rainfall trickling around the carpet and glass.

Happy Birthday. I hope you have a good one. It’s nice you won’t have to work.

I hope you enjoy the book and remember your sister while your reading it. I love you. Enjoy your birthday.

Love your sis,

Cheryl

I put the spray-painted copper copy of “Clear and Present Danger” back on the shelf in the fake child’s room. It slid easily between similarly coppered copies of “A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960” and a Tom Clancy’s “Without Remorse” that, based on a stamp on the title page, once belonged to a dentist from Santa Rosa, California. » Read the rest of this entry «

It’s not the most visible part, the tall condo buildings from that misguided period of American architecture known as the 1970s, when the point of a building was to crane above the others, out out out into a view you could brag about to your ground-dwelling coworkers.